• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 630 0

knows what the king of Kadesh and his confederates were doing all this time. They might have won the battle if they had had scouts farther along the Aruna road, or had brought up reinforcements in time to deal with Thutmose when he first came out of the pass. Perhaps they assumed that no soldier of any intelligence would venture upon the Aruna road, so narrow and so susceptible to ambush. Or perhaps they counted on the strong walls of Megiddo, for when Thutmose led the chariot charge against them next morning, they broke with scarcely a fight. “They fled headlong to Megiddo in terror, abandoning their horses and their chariots of gold and silver, and the people hauled them up into the city, pulling them by their clothing.”

The Egyptians enjoyed low comic touches of this sort, when the joke was on the enemy; the picture of the mighty prince of Kadesh being pulled up over the walls of Megiddo by his shirttails is rather funny. But what happened after that was not so amusing, and Thaneni, the army scribe, is bitter about it.

“Now if only the army of His Majesty had not given their hearts to plundering the belongings of the enemy, they would have captured Megiddo at this moment!” The sight of the abandoned horses (still uncommon and very valuable) and the jeweled equipment of the allies was too much for the Egyptian soldiers. They loyally carried the loot to the king, but Thutmose was not consoled. He urged the army on to victory: “The capture of Megiddo is the capture of a thousand towns!”

So the troops of Egypt had to pay for their greed with a long siege. They cut down the trees near the city and walled it in. The incompetent rebels had not planned to be besieged. They had left the very grain in the fields, and their empty stomachs must have felt even emptier as they looked over the city walls and saw the Egyptians munching the bread made from their crops. Famine finally took its toll; the “wretched Asiatics” came forth suing for peace.

Somehow or other the pièce de résistance of the confederation, the king of Kadesh, had slipped over both sets of walls one dark night and made his getaway; it is hard to imagine how, but he did. Despite this setback, Thutmose showed amazing clemency toward the inhabitants. Naturally, he took most of their property, but he allowed the allied soldiers transport to their distant homes. “Then My Majesty gave them leave to go to their towns. They all went by donkey, so that I might take their horses.”

In his haste to escape, the king of Kadesh had been forced to leave his family behind; either that “fallen one” was not bound by strong ties of familial affection or he relied rather trustingly on Thutmose’s clemency. His hopes were justified. Thutmose took them as hostages but did them no harm. It was safer to be besieged and captured by Thutmose III than by most later European conquerors.

After cleaning out the city of Megiddo, Thutmose took the road again, north to Lebanon. He subdued another confederation of three cities here and built a fortress. The season was growing late; the rains were due. Thutmose turned south toward Egypt, but not without a political stroke no less effective than his military exploits. He had appointed new chiefs for the conquered countries, to supplant the “rebellious” princes. The sons of the new rulers were taken to Egypt by the canny king, whose scribe explains: “Now whosoever of these princes died, His Majesty would cause his son to stand in his place.” The heirs of the Asiatics served as hostages for the loyalty of their fathers; and when they in turn came to rule their vassal cities they had become Egyptian in custom and language and sympathy, identifying themselves with the cultured Egyptians among whom they had been raised from childhood rather than with their own humble subjects. It was a masterstroke, and this is the first recorded instance of its being practiced, though later conquerors found it equally useful.

The city of Thebes was in celebration when the king returned, and Amon had the best cause to rejoice; he got the lion’s share of the plunder.